Satan (Hearts) Rick Scott

January 15, 2013

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Yesterday, Ron Lindsay joined the panel on HuffPost Live to talk about the practice of borrowing religious rituals between and outside of their originating faiths. Of course it gets heated.

Who doesn't want to be more like Sherlock Holmes? (I mostly just want to be more like Benedict Cumberbatch.) On Point of Inquiry, guest Maria Konnikova tells us how to think more like the literary supersleuth.

CSI's Joe Nickell (nonreligious) talks about how he and his wife Diana (Baha'i) go together on "religabouts":

A combined form of religion and walkabout (an Australian Aboriginal term for a type of nomadic quest), Religabout is our name for an excursion taken in order to observe or experience some religion-related event. We do not go to mock or challenge but rather to learn about other people and cultures.

Our Office of Public Policy gives props to GOP State Sen. David Long of Indiana for rejecting a school prayer bill infamously presented by State Sen. Dennis Kruse. You can thank him, too.

With the fading of science sections from newspapers, where is the science for the science consumer, the readers into health, medicine, chemistry, tech, environment, physics, and the less well-defined category of Really Cool Scientific Shit?

"The nature of the cuts proved that the attackers wanted to murder him," [surgeon Haridas] Saha said, adding that friends of Mohiuddin who were with him at the time of the attack blamed Islamic "fundamentalists".

As atheists, we truly feel awful for you. And we promise to work for more gun control. But the truth is we don’t have a single consoling thing to say to you because we atheists recognize that the human being is nothing more than matter, no different from all other matter in the universe except for having self-consciousness. Therefore, when we die, that’s it. Moreover, within a tiny speck of time in terms of the universe’s history, nearly every one of us, including your child, will be completely forgotten, as if we never even existed. Life is a random crapshoot. Our birth and existence are flukes. And you will never see your child again.

At Skeptical Inquirer, Thomas Patterson picks apart the pseudoscience of "live blood cell analysis by darkfield microscopy." Say that three times fast.

The Satanic Temple's Neil Bricke on the approval by Gov. Rick Scott of a Florida's bill that allows for the reading of "inspirational messages" in public schools:

The Satanic Temple embraces the free expression of religion, and Satanists are happy to show their support of Rick Scott who -- particularly with SB 98 -- has reaffirmed our American freedom to practice our faith openly, allowing our Satanic children the freedom to pray in school.

Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.

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Paul Fidalgo has been communications director of the Center for Inquiry since 2012. He holds a master’s degree in political management from George Washington University, and has worked previously for FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy and the Secular Coalition for America. Paul is also an actor and musician whose work includes five years performing with the American Shakespeare Center. He lives in Maine with his wife and kids. His blog at the Patheos network is iMortal, and he tweets at @paulfidalgo.